What you need to know: The upscale grocery chain posted quarterly revenue of $4.7 billion, which is up from $4.2 billion during the same quarter last year. Profits rose nearly 6% year-over-year, to $167 million, or 46 cents per share. The results just squeaked past Wall Street’s forecasts, as analysts predicted earnings of 45 cents per share, according to Thomson Reuters.

Strong same-store sales helped rally Whole Foods’ WFM share price, which gained 2.8% in after-hours trading after already rising 0.9% during the day. Whole Foods also said Wednesday that it is targeting same-store sales growth for the full year “in the low to middle single digits.”

The big number: Same-store sales, which are an important gauge for judging retailers’ performance, grew 4.5% during the quarter after climbing 3.1% during the previous quarter. In July, Whole Foods’ stock dropped after the company reported third-quarter same-store sales grew 3.9% when analysts had predicted 4.5% growth.

In a statement, co-CEO Walter Robb attributed the company’s sales growth to “customers’ positive response to our many strategic initiatives, along with improving consumer confidence.” Whole Foods recently began lowering its prices in an effort to fight the perception that the grocery chain caters only to affluent shoppers — a reputation that earned the store the nickname “Whole Paycheck.”

The company also recently ran its first national advertising campaign and tested its first-ever rewards program in an effort to hang onto market share. Whole Foods has faced increased competition from other high-end grocery chains as well as other retailers offering more organic products.

What you might have missed: Whole Foods opened nine new stores in the quarter and another three stores have already opened in the current quarter. Whole Foods plans to open eight more locations by the end of this quarter and it has signed 11 new leases for future sites, including three in Canada.

Last year, a Fortune cover story detailed Whole Foods’ growth plan, including plans to go from its current roster of 408 stores to more than 500 by 2017. The company said Wednesday it is on pace to hit that goal while eventually reaching 1,200 locations.

What you need to know: GoPro’s $634 million in quarterly revenue improved 75% year-over-year and more than doubled the company’s third-quarter sales of $280 million. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company easily outpaced the expectations of analysts, who predicted revenue of $580 million, according to Thomson Reuters. GoPro closed out 2014 with a 41% increase in annual revenue, to $1.4 billion.

GoPro’s quarterly profits nearly tripled to $122.3 million from $43.7 million during the same period in 2013. The company’s annual profits more than doubled, growing to $128.1 million from $60.6 million a year earlier.

The company also announced that COO Nina Richardson is leaving GoPro at the end of February. The company’s stock dropped more than 15% in after-hours trading following a day in which GoPro shares already improved by nearly 5%.

GoPro’s shares GPRO were down nearly 30% over the past three months. The company’s shares were in high demand for months after a successful IPO last June, but began to reverse course in the fall. (The company’s shares are still selling for more than double their $24 IPO price.)

The big number: Last month, GoPro CEO Nick Woodman boasted about the company’s uptick in sales during the holiday season, telling CNBC that “it was a GoPro Christmas” for the company as well as for retailers and customers. The launch of a new version of GoPro’s Hero line of wearable sports cameras in September helped make it a strong holiday season.

GoPro shipped 2.4 million cameras in the fourth quarter, which represents an improvement of 68% over the same period in 2013. In fact, the company said shipped more units in this most recent fourth quarter than it did in all of 2012. The company’s 5.2 million shipments for the whole of 2014 marked a 35% jump over the previous year’s shipments.

What you might have missed: GoPro has been touting its strategy to expand beyond just camera sales to a full-fledged media company, and it noted in the earnings release the importance of adding live-broadcast capability to its cameras. Last month, the company announced a long-term partnership with the National Hockey League that will see the league’s players and referees using GoPro cameras to film live action during games.

Also on Thursday, GoPro announced a deal with streaming media company Roku to add a GoPro channel to Roku’s portfolio of streaming content. GoPro previously announced a similar partnership with Microsoft’s Xbox gaming console.

‘Frozen’ heats up Disney’s earnings

Revenue for the first quarter of the Walt Disney Company’s 2015 fiscal year jumped 9% as sales of merchandise from the hit animated film Frozen dominated the holiday season. Here are the key points from Tuesday’s earnings report.

What you need to know:Frozen remains one of Disney’s DIS hottest properties more than a year after it became the highest-grossing animated film of all time. The film’s merchandise lifted last year’s U.S. retail toy sales and contributed to a strong quarter for Disney, which also saw steady growth from its television and cable networks including ABC and ESPN.

Disney’s first-quarter revenue improved 9% from the same period last year, to $13.4 billion, blowing past analysts’ prediction of $12.9 billion. The company’s profits of $2.2 billion, or $1.28 per share, represented a 19% increase.

In a statement, Disney CEO Bob Iger bragged that the results “once again reflect the strength of our brands and high quality content and demonstrate that our proven franchise strategy creates long-term value across all of our businesses.” Last year, Disney’s board handed Iger, who Fortunerecently profiled, a contract extension through 2018. In 2014, Disney extended its streak of record-breaking annual revenue to four straight years.

Disney’s stock jumped more than 3% in after-hours trading after the company released its latest earnings.

The big number: The “Mouse House” reported a 22% bump in consumer product sales for the quarter, to $1.4 billion. Frozenmerchandise sales drove the increase once again. Toys and other products related to the film, which was actually released in November 2013, sold well throughout 2014 and drove a 7% increase in full-year consumer product sales last year for Disney.

Disney’s largest and most profitable segment, its television and cable networks, posted first-quarter revenue of nearly $5.9 billion. That marked an 11% increase over the same period last year despite rising programming costs and a decline in advertising revenue at ESPN. Disney’s $15 billion media rights contract with the NFL kicked in last year, leading to higher costs for ESPN. In October, the company also signed a new, $24 billion deal to air NBA games on ESPN and ABC that will drive up rights costs again in a couple of years.

What you might have missed: Revenue for Disney’s studio entertainment segment dipped 2% in the quarter, to $1.9 billion, because of lower box-office numbers in what was a down year overall for movie-ticket sales. Disney’s quarterly decline came despite a strong performance from Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, which was the second-best grossing film released in 2014. The company said in its earnings release that the segment suffered from a difficult comparison to last year’s first quarter, when Frozen performed well at the box office.

Disney did manage to increase quarterly revenue at its theme parks and resorts by 9%, to $3.9 billion. That’s despite California’s Disneyland making unflattering headlines last month due to a measles outbreak that likely occurred at the end of the first quarter. Iger told CNBC on Tuesday that Disney has “not been able to discern any impact” from the outbreak.

Disney is also delaying the opening of the $5.5 billion Disneyland Shanghai — the company’s first theme park in China — until next year, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company originally planned to open the park near the end of this year, but Iger said in a call with analysts Tuesday that the opening will be pushed back until the spring of 2016 in order to complete previously announced plans to add additional attractions to the park.

(UPDATE: This article has been updated with information from Disney’s earnings call.)

Google’s growth underwhelms as spending balloons

Google’s quarterly revenue came in below Wall Street’s expectations as growth in ad clicks slowed while research and development costs continued to rise. Here are the key points from the online search giant’s fourth-quarter earnings release.

What you need to know: Google GOOG reported quarterly revenue of $18.1 billion, which fell short of analysts’ forecasted revenue of nearly $18.5 billion. The quarterly sales figures represented a 15% year-over-year increase for Google, but Wall Street was expecting more. Google also reported full-year revenue of $66 billion for 2014, which was up 19%.

Shifting currencies, including the strengthening U.S. dollar, took a toll on the company’s revenue. Google said in its earnings release that its revenue would have been $541 million higher had fourth-quarter foreign exchange rates remained unchanged from the previous quarter.

The company’s profits grew by more than 40% to $4.8 billion, or $7.01 per share. Google’s full-year profits increased almost 3%, to $20.6 billion.

Still, Google’s shares dipped about 2% in after-hours trading on earnings that fell short of Wall Street’s expectations. The company’s stock has fallen off by 9% over the past year as investors reacted to high R&D spending on programs and products that have yet to yield big returns.

The big number: As usual, Google saw the bulk of its revenue come from ad sales, which brought in $16.2 billion in revenue, up from $14.1 billion a year earlier.

However, Google has seen declines in its paid-click growth in recent quarters and that trend seems to be continuing. The company said Thursday that aggregate paid clicks rose 14% year-over-year, but only 11% over the third quarter of 2014. Paid clicks in the third quarter were up 17% over the same period in 2013.

Meanwhile, the cost-per-click for ads on both Google sites and the sites of members of the Google network dropped by 3% from the previous quarter and was also down 3% year-over-year as the impact of lower-priced mobile ads took their toll. The cost-per-click for Google sites alone was down 8%.

What you might have missed: Google’s costs and expenses ballooned by 22%, to $13.7 billion. Leading the way was a 46% jump in research and development costs, which grew to $2.8 billion. The company’s R&D spending has frustrated investors in the past as Google has poured billions of dollars into high-profile Google X projects such as Google Glass, self-driving cars and balloons that deliver Internet service. Those projects may cause a stir in the media but they are far from adding to the company’s profits.

Mobile ads fuel Facebook’s growth, again

Facebook’s sales jumped nearly 50% in the latest quarter, fueled by growing ad revenue from more users connecting through their mobile phones, the company said Wednesday. Here are the key points from Facebook’s fourth quarter earnings report.

What you need to know: The social networking giant continued to ride a strong mobile ad business to $3.85 billion in quarterly revenue — an increase of 49% from $2.6 billion during the same quarter a year earlier. Facebook’s quarterly profits totaled $701 million, or 25 cents per share, representing a 34% year-over-year increase.

Once again, Facebook FB got a bulk of its revenue from mobile ads as it surpassed analyst expectations of $3.7 billion in revenue. Facebook’s sales have grown by about 60% in each of the previous two quarters with much of those gains attributed to mobile ads. Despite topping analysts’ forecasts, Facebook’s fourth quarter saw the company’s slowest rate of quarterly sales growth since early-2013 and the company’s shares dipped slightly in after-hours trading.

“We got a lot done in 2014,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. “Our community continues to grow and we’re making progress towards connecting the world,”

The big number: Facebook ended 2014 with 1.39 billion monthly active users (MAUs), which was up 13% from 2013. Mobile MAUs grew by 26% in 2014, to 1.19 billion.

Facebook’s expanding mobile ad business, which has shown huge gains over the past couple of years, represented nearly 69% of the company’s $3.6 billion in ad revenue. Ad sales were up 53% from last year’s fourth quarter, when mobile ads accounted for only 53% of overall ad revenue.

What you might have missed: In October, Facebook’s tumbled slightly following the company’s third-quarter earnings report after the company announced plans to dramatically increase the company’s spending on hiring and acquisitions in 2015. In the fourth quarter, Facebook said, the company’s capital expenditures rose 7%, to $517 million.

Apple shines with record earnings on huge iPhone sales

Apple reported quarterly earnings Tuesday that managed to surpass even Wall Street’s lofty expectations after analysts predicted a record quarter for the tech giant. Apple did, in fact, post record sales numbers following strong holiday sales that included a 46% increase in iPhone sales.

Here are the key points from Apple’s earnings release for the first quarter of its 2015 financial year.

What you need to know: Wall Street was expecting huge numbers from the quarter, which included the holidays and the first full quarter of sales for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. Apple certainly did not disappoint. In fact, the only surprise was just how much the company’s sales improved.

Apple racked up $74.6 billion in revenue last quarter, a 29.5% gain on the same period a year before. Earlier on Tuesday, Fortune polled 35 analysts who expected revenue to increase by about 20%, to $68.7 billion, while Apple’s own guidance for the quarter predicted $66.5 billion in quarterly revenue.

A larger-than-expected bump in holiday iPhone sales propelled Apple to record sales and the best quarterly earnings of any company ever. Apple reported a whopping $18 billion in first-quarter profits, or $3.08 per share. It tops the previous record-holder, Russia’s GazProm, which recorded a $16 billion quarterly profit in 2011, while Exxon Mobil held the previous record for a U.S. company with nearly $15 billion in a quarter of 2008.

In a statement, Apple CEO Tim Cook thanked his company’s customers “for an incredible quarter, which saw demand for Apple products soar to an all-time high.”

Cook, who took over for Steve Jobs in 2011, has watched Apple’s market value double during his tenure as CEO. The company’s shares AAPL, which had been slightly down for the year, jumped nearly 5% in after-hours trading after the earnings report.

The company said it expects revenue between $52 billion and $55 billion in the current quarter.

The big number: This most recent quarter marked the first full fiscal quarter of sales for the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, big sellers during the holiday season. Apple was expected to sell 67 million iPhone units during the quarter, which would have been quite the improvement over the 51 million the company sold during the same period a year earlier. Instead, Apple moved 74.5 million of the smartphones during the quarter — a 46% increase that accounted for $51.2 billion of the company’s overall revenue last quarter.

Of course, that means that sales of just one product, the iPhone, comprised almost 69% of the company’s overall quarterly revenue. Some analysts have expressed concern about Apple’s dependence on the iPhone, particularly in a fickle smartphone market where consumers often change their tastes amid increasing choices from competitors. For now, though, there is no question that Apple’s leading product is succeeding.

Meanwhile, iPad sales slipped about 18% in the first quarter, to 21.4 million units sold after the company released new iterations of its iPad Air and iPad mini tablets. Mac sales increased, slightly, to 5.5 million units sold.

Apple’s next big product launch is the highly-anticipated Apple Watch, which was announced last fall with the new iPhones but won’t go on sale until April, CEO Tim Cook said during a call with analysts. BGC Financial’s Colin Gillis expects Apple to sell 30 million of the new watches in the first four quarters after it’s release.

What you might have missed: Apple’s largest regional sales increase came in the Greater China area, where the company’s revenue jumped 70%, to $16.1 billion, year-over-year. Apple has been expanding its presence in China and recently announced it would open five new stores in the country to bring its total there to 20 stores — or, half the number Cook wants in China within two years.

Microsoft’s profits dip despite strong cloud, phone sales

Microsoft said Monday its profits fell more than 10% during its latest quarter despite an uptick in sales. Here are the key points from the tech giant’s latest earnings report.

What you need to know: Microsoft’s MSFT sales jumped nearly 8% in the quarter ending Dec. 31, improving to $26.5 billion. That is in line with the $26.3 billion in revenue that analysts expected, according to Thomson Reuters. But the company’s profits fell by 10.6% to $5.9 billion, or 71 cents per share.

Contributing to the decline in earnings was a $243 million charge the company took from “integration and restructuring expenses” related to the massive layoffs Microsoft announced last summer as well as ongoing costs from integrating the mobile phone business it acquired from Nokia in early 2014.

Microsoft shares dropped by 2.5% in after-hours trading following the release of the company’s financials.

The big number: CEO Satya Nadella has put a lot of focus on cloud computing since taking control of the company last year. Now, the company has said that commercial cloud sales more than doubled again in the latest quarter, the third under Nadella’s watch as CEO. That’s after cloud sales jumped 128% in the previous quarter.

A 30% gain in non-corporate Office 365 subscribers last quarter helped drive the increased cloud revenue, which Microsoft said extrapolates to $5.5 billion annually based on last quarter’s returns. “Microsoft is continuing to transform, executing against our strategic priorities and extending our cloud leadership,” Nadella said in a statement.

Microsoft’s overall revenue also received a major boost from its phone hardware sales, which added $2.3 billion to the quarterly tally by selling a record 10.5 million Lumia smartphones. Still, Windows Phones lost some of their share of the U.S. smartphone market in 2014, dropping to 3.1% from 3.3% the previous year, according to data from eMarketer.

What you might have missed: Sales of the company’s Surface tablets continue to gain steam, even if they still lag far behind iPad sales. Microsoft said its Surface revenue crossed the $1 billion mark for the first time, rising 24% year-over-year to $1.1 billion last quarter. By comparison, Apple AAPLreported $5.3 billion in iPad sales in its most recent quarter.

Meanwhile, Microsoft said its search advertising revenue jumped by 23% last quarter, helped by a slight increase in the company’s share of the U.S. search market. Microsoft’s Bing grabbed a 19.7% U.S. market share last year, which was up slightly and outpaced Yahoo’s 10.2%, according to comScore.

Microsoft also received a boost from a strong holiday retail season for its Xbox One gaming console, which sold 6.6 million units in the quarter. The company said last week that the Xbox One was the bestselling console in the U.S. in November and December after Microsoft slashed the price of the popular console, from $499 when it was first released in 2013, to $349 at the end of October. Still, overall sales for the company’s computing and gaming hardware segment dropped more than 10%, to $3.9 billion, in the second quarter.

Netflix shares surge as subscriber growth picks up

Netflix closed out 2014 on a high note, posting a 26% gain in fourth-quarter revenue while adding more than four million subscribers in the year’s final quarter. Here are the key points from Tuesday’s Netflix earnings report:

What you need to know: Netflix NFLX pulled in $1.48 billion in fourth-quarter revenue, up from $1.18 billion during the same quarter last year, according to a letter to the company’s shareholders. The online video streaming service collected $5.5 billion in revenue for the full year, representing a 26% increase from 2013’s $4.4 billion in sales.

Netflix also saw its fourth-quarter profits soar 72% — to $83.4 million, or $1.38 per share — up from $48.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2013. For the full year, the company collected profits of $266.8 million, or $4.44 per share, which more than doubled the previous year’s tally.

The big number: As usual, the market’s reaction to Netflix’s earnings hinged on the extent to which the company grew its customer base. Netflix didn’t disappoint in the fourth quarter, adding 4.33 million subscribers — accelerating from a 4.07 million increase during the same quarter last year. In total, the company has 57.4 million subscribers globally.

Shares of Netflix spiked in after-hours trading as investors reacted to the strong financial numbers and user growth. After falling by nearly 25% over the past six months, the company’s stock jumped more than 15%, approaching nearly $400 per share.

Netflix shares plunged in October, despite increased profits, when the company fell short of its own projections by adding just over 3 million new subscribers in the third quarter. Earlier in the year, share prices surged when the company topped 50 million subscribers for the first time during the second quarter. Despite worries over stops and starts in Netflix’s user growth rate, the company said on Tuesday it added 13 million new members in 2014 — a personal best. The company expects to add more than 4 million subscribers again in the current quarter, which would bring the global total to 61.4 million users.

International growth has been key to Netflix finding new customers and more than half of its fourth-quarter user growth came overseas. In their letter to shareholders, CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells said that Netflix will launch in Australia and New Zealand later this quarter. The executives also wrote that they want to “complete our global expansion” — which would put Netflix in about 200 countries (it’s currently in 50 countries) — by the end of 2016 while still remaining profitable, “which is earlier than we expected.”

What you might have missed: Hastings offered shareholders his usual rundown of updates on Netflix’s competitors, noting a lack of information about the timing and pricing for HBO Go’s pending standalone service. The letter also included something of an understatement: “Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Yahoo are all increasing their original programming efforts,” a nod to how the companies are following Netflix’s footsteps in developing original shows.

Amazon AMZN has been working diligently to rapidly expand its portfolio of original streaming content, including signing iconic writer-director Woody Allen to helm his first-ever television series exclusively for its Prime Instant Video service. Over the weekend, Amazon also said it plans to put out roughly a dozen original films each year — first, in theaters, followed shortly by online releases through Prime.

“In general, Internet TV is going mainstream, which both increases the size of the market and brings new competitors,” the executives wrote. “It couldn’t be a more exciting time in our industry!”

Hastings and Wells spent far more time touting their own original content, including the upcoming full-length feature film sequel to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as well as a handful of new television series and the return of popular series House of Cards. (The letter even ends with a congratulatory note to Cards star Kevin Spacey for his recent Golden Globe win for acting on the show.)

Meanwhile, somewhat buried in the letter is the announcement that Sony’s controversial comedy The Interview will make a Jan. 24 debut on Netflix, less than a month after its limited release in theaters and through video-on-demand.

Smith & Wesson misfire: Rifle sales drop 50%

Gun maker Smith & Wesson said on Thursday that rifle sales dropped by more than half in the Springfield, Mass. company’s latest quarter. The steep decline is part of a 22% dip in overall sales for Smith & Wesson, according to the company’s second-quarter earnings report.

Smith & Wesson SWHC blamed the sales misfire on a drop-off in consumer demand from last year, when the fear of potential government restrictions on gun ownership led gun-owners to stockpile firearms. Earlier this year, the company warned of lower gun sales in the U.S. going forward as part of a lowered sales forecast for the rest of the year.

Smith & Wesson shares dipped as much as 4% in after-hours trading as investors reacted to the latest disappointing sales numbers from the company, which has seen its stock drop 30% since the start of the year and reported overall sales that were off by 24% in the first quarter.

Also on Thursday, Smith & Wesson reported second-quarter profits of $5.1 million, or 9 cents per share, which is down from nearly $17 million in the same quarter last year. The company’s $108.4 million in second-quarter revenue actually beat Wall Street estimates (of around $105 million), but Smith & Wesson also delivered a lower than expected third-quarter outlook. The company expects earnings in the current quarter to fall between 9 cents and 11 cents per share, while analysts were expecting 21 cents per share.

Hewlett-Packard sales drop ahead of split into two companies

In its first financial report since announcing plans to split its printing and computers unit from its hardware and services business, Hewlett-Packard said sales in its latest quarter fell 2% while full-year sales declined 1%. Here are some of the key points of Tuesday’s fourth-quarter earnings report.

What you need to know: Wall Street expected a weak quarter from HP, and the company delivered it with $28.4 billion in quarterly revenue, just below the forecasted $28.7 billion. The drop comes after HP announced its first quarterly sales gain in roughly four years for the third quarter, when revenue was $27.6 billion.

The company’s fourth-quarter profits fell slightly to $1.3 billion, or 71 cents per share, down from $1.4 during the same quarter last year.

For the full year, HP reported $111.5 billion in sales, down 1% from the 2013 fiscal year. Profits for year dropped 1.9%, to $5.01 billion, or $2.66 per share.

HP’s HPQ share price dipped about 1% in after-hours trading following the release of its earnings report. The company’s stock is up nearly 7% since the planned split was announced last month; its shares have gained more than 34% so far this year as investors have backed CEO Meg Whitman’s turnaround efforts.

The big number: With a split into two publicly-traded companies set for next year, investors had been hoping for some insight into what lies ahead. However, HP did not include “costs associated with separation,” an important expense, in its outlook for the current quarter and the 2015 fiscal year.

The company predicted earnings excluding certain costs of between 72 cents and 76 cents per share for the first quarter and full-year earnings between $3.23 and $3.43 per share for 2015.

Whitman has maintained that the ongoing turnaround for HP is unlikely to be completed until 2016, and she expressed optimism on Tuesday that the plan remained on track. “There’s still a lot left to do, but our efforts to date, combined with the separation we announced in October, sets the stage for accelerated progress in [the 2015 fiscal year] and beyond,” Whitman said in a statement.

What you might have missed: While fourth-quarter sales were down across most of HP’s segments, the computer division was among the few to post gains with sales improving by 4%. Within that segment, though, was a 2% drop in desktop sales that followed two straight quarters of gains. Combined, the computers and printing business that will soon be split off posted revenue gains of 0.2% in the fourth quarter and 2.2% for 2014 fiscal year.